Leo, Alanis, Conan

Two days ago I read “The Death of Ivan Ilych” by Leo Tolstoy. It’s a 20,000 word novella that can be read in a few hours. I’m convinced I read it before, in my twenties, at a time in my young life  when I foolishly believed NOT to have read certain canonical works was a sign of intellectual defect. I retained little to nothing of that first reading.

This time, however, it stayed with me.

The key sentence to me: Ivan Ilych’s life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible.

By simple and ordinary, Tolstoy means and describes a life lived entirely based on expectations of others. Ivan is born into an upper middle class family. He devotes himself entirely to an inherited career in the Russian bureaucracy with a salary large enough to pretend to the lifestyle and the furnishings that imitate the truly wealthy, but that fools no one. His salary increases, but is never sufficient to save money or stave off money worries. He marries the type he’s expected to marry and has children because that too is expected. His main distraction from work is playing bridge (an actual bridge hand is given some detail, and symbolically, Ivan fails to make a makeable “slam.”)

Ivan’s illness is never properly diagnosed, but he gets progressively sicker until it’s clear to everyone, including Ivan, that he will soon die, aged forty-five. He then has an awful “aha” revelation. His life has been a charade, patently false, and everyone he knows, his family and friends, are likewise entirely false. He faces a long painful decline into death with nothing to do but be alone by choice and contemplate his pain and his life. His physical pain is greatly accentuated by the mental anguish that he will die having failed to live in a worthwhile way. His only pleasant memories are of his childhood. Everything post-childhood now seems “trivial” and “nasty.” Anything he once considered to be a joy as an adult now seems “worthless” and “doubtful.”

One of the pleasures of the internet is how one article can spin off to the next, until, not unlike the childhood game of “telephone,” you find yourself far afield from where you started. I read an article about the joy of any intellectual pursuit when its purpose was confined to the pursuit itself and had nothing to do with what might be produced. The article mentioned nihilism so I started reading about that protean word’s various modern definitions. That led me to some articles about Nietzsche’s philosophy, which made me curious about Tolstoy’s take on Nietzsche (a philosophical fraud), which surprised me and led me to Ivan Ilych because the little I remembered of the novella seemed to contain a Nietzschean message.

The best modern expression of Ivan Ilych comes to me from Alanis Morrisette’s great 1995 album Jagged Little Pill on my favorite song “All I Really Want.” The lyrics below are sufficient, but you have to listen to the song to get the full impact from her incredible voice, at once raspy and melodic.

Enough about me, let's talk about you for a minute
Enough about you, let's talk about life for a while
The conflicts, the craziness and the sound of pretenses falling
All around, all around

Why are you so petrified of silence?
Here can you handle this?

(a few beats without any sound)

Did you think about your bills, you ex, your deadlines
Or when you think you're going to die?
Or did you long for the next distraction?

Here are my takeaways from these lyrics (you may accuse me of reading too much into them, but I’ll counter that once a writer unleashes their words, anyone can make of them what they will.)

Life is absurd, there is no grand meaning to it. It is an “abyss” that ends in death. We have great difficulty in facing this reality so we distract ourselves as best we can. That’s why silence is so unnerving.

But Tolstoy didn’t believe that there’s only the abyss and neither did Nietzsche. The key question for both of them was how to live so when we inevitably contemplate the abyss, we do not suffer as did Ivan Ilych. That instead we have something inside of us–––a code, profound relationships, community–––that can sustain us when the distractions no longer distract and we have to confront our life stripped of pretense.

I’ve encountered depression, so I have a taste of what the abyss and abject hopelessness feel like. Lately, I’ve confronted disappointment and been saddened by it but not devastated. I’ve accepted my disappointment in the spirit of the famous movie aphorism Nietzsche wrote for Schwarzenegger in Conan the Barbarian: “What Doesn’t Destroy Us Makes Us Stronger.”

Ok, yes, that aphorism is unrivaled as a cliché. But, it’s true. So it has value.

Here’s Alanis:

Here’s a link to The Death of Ivan Ilych

https://open.lib.umn.edu/ivanilich/chapter/full-text-english/